Google goes crazy for Capital of Culture

WORLDWIDE interest has been generated by the launch of the city’s 2008 European Capital of Culture extravaganza.

The Liverpool Culture Company has revealed that “Liverpool 08” was in the top five searched items in the Google internet search engine worldwide last week.

Kris Donaldson, acting chief executive of the Culture Company, said: “This just shows the level of interest there is in Liverpool and the city’s Culture year both locally, nationally and internationally.”

According to The Mersey Partnership, the region’s official tourist board, visitors to TMP’s visitliverpool.com website increased by 138% between last Thursday and last Friday as international attention focused on launch events for 2008.

Publishers and broadcasters across Europe, North America, Africa and Asia have featured the launch of Capital of Culture.

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Between January 10 and 15, almost 1,200 individual items of coverage (1,194) were recorded from countries as far apart as Antigua and China.

Visitors to the tourist board’s site viewed more than 1m pages during the 24 hours of the People’s Opening – the highest daily total in the site’s history. TMP’s Accommodation Booking Service is also busy handling enquiries from all over the world, and is already taking a high volume of accommodation bookings for key dates including the John Smith’s Grand National; the Open Golf Championship at Royal Birkdale and the return of the Tall Ships to the River Mersey.

Bookings made via the site have risen by 20% compared to the same five-day period last year.

Demand for the Tourist Board’s Liverpool City Region Visitor Guide was unprecedented. More than 4,000 copies were snapped up and a further 2,000 copies have already been requested or downloaded by people considering or planning a trip to Liverpool and logging on at visitliverpool.com

For 2008, this annual, fullcolour publication is a 140-page edition with a total print run of 200,000 copies.

Demand for the new guide is expected to increase following worldwide media coverage of the destination last weekend.

TMP chief executive Lorraine Rogers said: “Compared with traffic on the site on the same date last January, Friday saw an increase of 283% in the number of visitors to vistiliverpool.com”

Liverpool Daily Post

Liverpool in Pictures/ YO! Liverpool has taken me over 10 years to develop and maintain.

It takes about five seconds thought to realise that this story's groundless. The fifth most popular search term in the world? The whole world has only four things on its mind other than 'liverpool 08'?

It takes about another minute of searching on Google Trends to prove that this is rubbish. Never mind searches for the likes of Iraq, Barack Obama, Britney Spears, any celebrity, etc, the term 'liverpool 08' doesn't beat searches for 'London', 'Manchester' or even 'Stavanger' on any single day in January so far.

Sloppy journalism from the Daily Post and ridiculous posturing from the Culture Company.